After the shock of his heart attack in June 1980, Steve Ross booked a cruise on the QE2 for him and Amanda. It was part recuperation, part reward for Amanda’s efforts in helping him back to health. While his intentions were admirable, Ross couldn’t have foreseen that the trip would signal the beginning of the end for their marriage. Stuck on the ship for days on end with nowhere to run or hide, Ross and Burden realized how distant they had become from each other.
Matters failed to improve when they returned to Manhattan and argued about where they were going to live. Ross had ambitious plans to redevelop his grand apartment at 740 Park Avenue and employ a large staff to help maintain it, but although she had come from an affluent background, Burden was indifferent to the trappings of Steve Ross’s wealth and wanted something smaller and more private.
Invariably, Ross got his way. Within a week of the move, however, Burden would be gone. Divorce proceedings were instigated. Within months, Ross would be back in the arms of Courtney Sale.
Having lost another wife, Ross would also lose his best friend soon after. On February 9,1981, Jay Emmett, Steve Ross’s closest friend and confidant, pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge and, as part of a plea bargain, agreed to cooperate with the authorities as the investigation into the Westchester Theater continued. To his horror, that cooperation would entail his endeavoring to tape a telephone call with Steve Ross—now the U.S. Attorney General’s prime target—in which he would have to persuade his friend to incriminate himself. It was something that Emmett just couldn’t do and Ross would eventually emerge from the investigation unscathed.
Although Emmett did not have to surrender his Warner stock (said to be worth around $7 million), it was the end of his career at the company and, more significantly, the end of his friendship with Steve Ross. After his guilty plea (and a suspended sentence) Jay Emmett resigned from WCI and The Two Musketeers’, as Mark Ross calls them, would never speak again. ‘When Jay left, the glue was gone. The place was never the same,’ says Norman Samnick.
The continuing Westchester investigation took the gloss off another stratospheric set of results for Atari. With the nation’s video game arcades now taking in an astonishing $5 billion annually, and public interest in space exploration reignited by the inaugural flight of the space shuttle Columbia, Atari had cemented its position as the market leader with the release of another hit game,’ Asteroids’. Picking up where Space Invaders had left off, Asteroids was an updated version of an earlier game developed by Nolan Bushnell called ‘Computer Space’, and capitalized on the public’s voracious appetite for virtual intergalactic warfare.
By now, the video arcade had hammered the final nail in pinball’s coffin and was fast usurping the movie theatre as the place for young people to spend their time and, crucially, their money. Everywhere you looked there were video games. From Safeways to Sears, from pizza parlors to hotel lobbies, kids would turn up with their quarters and forego that second Coke in favor of another shot at defending the earth from alien aggressors. If you were good, you could make that quarter last half an hour. If you weren’t, you could still hang around and watch some other kid top that high score. In Beaumont, Texas, for example, one David Jeanise broke the record for the ‘Asteroids’ high score by racking up 22,254,110 points in a game that lasted 36 hours and 29 minutes at the town’s Rainbow Roller Rink. As one Atari official said, ‘One of the secrets of the success of our games is that the most gnomish kid can play and become a champion. You don’t have to be a big athlete or a good dancer. And every kid knows he can beat his parents.’
Despite less than impressive years from the movie and record divisions and the downturn in the economy, the success of Atari—it had now amassed annual profits close to $300 million—had helped double the value of Warner’s stock to $61 a share and analysts were suggesting that Atari was now arguably bigger than its parent company. Towards the end of the year, Atari head Raymond Kassar reported to the budget meeting of WCI and declared that, if their projections were right, Atari would be pulling in revenues of $6 billion per annum by 1986. While Steve Ross and the board were delighted with the forecast, they couldn’t have been as happy as Raymond Kassar, who would take home a $6 million bonus for his endeavors.
The success of Atari was in direct contrast to the fortunes of the NASL. With clubs hemorrhaging cash and fans in their thousands finding other ways to spend their time, the league roster was cut from twenty-four to twenty teams, as the franchises at Houston, Memphis, Rochester and Detroit folded. Moreover, FIFA had also run out of patience with the NASL’s tinkering with the laws and had threatened the USSF with expulsion unless they reverted to the same rules that every other affiliated association used. That meant the end of the 35-yard line and the NASL’s unique interpretation of the offside rule. Failure to comply and the NASL would be deemed an outlaw league and therefore unable to trade with those leagues around the world still associated with FIFA. With no option but to conform, the NASL reluctantly agreed to discontinue the 35-yard line rule at the end of the 1981 season. ‘I still believe that the 35-yard line made for a more attack-minded game,’ says Phil Woosnam today, ‘but you can’t really argue with FIFA.’
The Cosmos, meanwhile, had embarked on another of its marathon pre-season expeditions. This time, it was a nine-game tour of South America taking in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil and ending with a stop-off in Mexico on the way home. Like it or not, since Pelé joined in 1975 the Cosmos had become soccer’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters. In that time, it had been on two, sometimes three tours a year, visited six continents and played in front of crowds usually far in excess of those it would attract back home.
Not only did its tours give a welcome opportunity for some of the younger players to experience playing against established teams in front of real football crowds that fought, swore and threw things on the field, but they also generated considerable amounts of revenue for the club, something it badly needed. In that time, it had beaten some of the leading names in world soccer such as Santos of Brazil, Roma of Italy and FC Cologne of Germany but it had also been humbled by a long list of teams whose names it would rather forget. That, according to Ahmet Ertegun, was part and parcel of being the Cosmos. ‘Playing in a different country every three days in front of packed stadiums may mean an embarrassing loss on occasion,’ he told the New York Times. ‘Our eventual goal is to be the best team in the world, and the way to get there is to play anywhere against the best at any time. We’ve never shied away from anyone.’
While the results on the tour were typically erratic, the fans still turned out in numbers to see the Cosmos. In one six-day period, the Cosmos beat Penerol of Uruguay 4–3, lost 3–1 to Sao Paulo of Brazil and then defeated the Paraguayan national team 5–2. The total attendance for those three games alone exceeded 135,000. Proof, if it were needed, that even if the NASL was flagging, the Cosmos was still a premier act.
A few suspect results, though, were the least of the club’s concerns, and trouble, never far behind the Cosmos, caught up with the team in Chile. After a 1–0 defeat at the hands of Colo Colo in Santiago, Carlos Alberto decided to take a flight to his home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to meet up with his parents and take part in the annual Mardi Gras carnival. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell the coach.
It would be the final spat between Carlos Alberto and Weisweiler. When Carlos Alberto finally returned to the team, Weisweiler handed him an indefinite suspension without pay for his unscheduled sojourn, despite the Brazilian’s insistence that Steve Ross had approved the trip.
Back in Manhattan, Carlos Alberto called a press conference on the roof terrace of his apartment on the Upper East Side to announce that he was leaving the Cosmos. Tearfully, he told reporters that the only reason he was going was because of the continuing difficulties he was experiencing with coach Weisweiler. After being dropped for the Soccer Bowl and then being suspended for his trip to Rio, the sweeper had decided that, at thirty-six years old and having been the NASL’s best defender for the last three years, he no longer needed the kind of treatment he felt he was receiving. ‘The Cosmos gave me two options,’ he said. ‘One was to retire with pay for the last year of my contract, and the other was to find a team for myself.’ A few weeks later and with a number of clubs keen to sign him, Carlos Alberto did just that, securing a three-year deal with the California Surf.
The loss of a player as influential as Carlos Alberto may have finished teams with less strength in depth and less backing than the Cosmos, but they had an embarrassment of alternatives to fill the void. Not only did they have Jeff Durgan in the heart of their defense, they had several players who could play the sweeper role if required. On the trip to South America, for example, Weisweiler took the opportunity of Carlos Alberto’s absence to experiment with a variety of players in his position, including Vladislav Bogicevic and the defender they had just reacquired from the Washington Diplomats, Bob Iarusci. ‘I was in Acapulco on holiday and Giorgio happened to be there too. Chinaglia had the penthouse at Warner’s Las Brisas resort and I was in one of the hotels on the strip. Anyway, he found out that I was in town and called me . . . before I knew it he was on the phone to the general manager at the Cosmos and getting me transferred back.’
Both Bogicevic and Iarusci would perform admirably in the sweeper’s role, but neither would ever be Carlos Alberto. While the likes of Neeskens, Roberto Cabanas, Frangçis Van der Elst and even an aging Chinaglia were all still capable of dictating matches in the NASL, they were manifestly not the kind of name players who would fill the swathes of empty seats at Giants Stadium. With no Pelé, Beckenbauer or Carlos Alberto, the Cosmos had become a team without an A-list soccer star and that, with attendances heading in the wrong direction, was a problem.
Even the second Trans-Atlantic Challenge Cup and games against Scotland’s Glasgow Celtic, England’s Southampton (featuring Kevin Keegan) and the Seattle Sounders failed to charm the crowds back to Meadowlands. Again, the Cosmos went undefeated but this time relinquished its title to Seattle on goals scored.
Crowds or no crowds, Giorgio Chinaglia still wasn’t happy. If he wasn’t bemoaning the lack of flair in the team or taking pot shots at the coach, he was finding the most inconsequential things to complain about. An hour before the kickoff of the evening game in Montreal, for example, he was seen stomping around the locker room like a grizzly with a migraine. Somebody, it transpired, had forgotten to pack his favorite jockstrap and the replacement they had found for him wasn’t up to his usual high standards. It was time to call on Joe Manfredi again. ‘You know Giorgio,’ smiles Manfredi, ‘got to get what he wants, and when he wants it.’
With the players changed and ready to take the field to warm up, Manfredi dove into a cab and demanded to be taken straight to the nearest sports store. He arrived just as the security guard was closing the doors. After some gentle persuasion and desperate name-dropping, Manfredi was allowed in and press-ganged the nearest sales assistant into helping him in his search for a jockstrap. ‘She thought I was crazy,’ laughs Manfredi.
Manfredi returned to the Olympic Stadium brandishing the jockstrap like Neville Chamberlain and his piece of paper. He arrived to find the locker room empty, except for the lone figure of Giorgio Chinaglia, sitting in the corner. ‘Giorgio would not go on the field,’ he continues. ‘Everybody went on the field to warm up, Giorgio didn’t go. He was waiting for the jockstrap.’
The dearth of star talent at the Cosmos didn’t detract from its results. As usual, the team breezed into the play-offs as Eastern Division champions with a 23–9 regular season record.
Superficially, that record looked solid enough but there was mounting concern that the team was running out of steam at a crucial part of the season. Going into the play-offs, the Cosmos had lost four of its last six games, and in the last eight matches, Giorgio Chinaglia had found the net just three times. For almost any other striker in the league, it would have been a perfectly adequate return, but for Chinaglia, whose goal a game ratio was incomparable, it represented something approaching a slump.
Needless to say, it wasn’t his fault. Instead, Chinaglia laid the blame squarely at the feet of Hennes Weisweiler and, in doing so, fired the first shots in a feud with the coach that would make his previous quarrels with Gordon Bradley, Ken Furphy and Eddie Firmani look like minor misunderstandings. Tm complaining about the style of play,’ said the Cosmos captain. ‘We should attack more. This guy is very conservative. We won only one game comfortably all year.’ The fact that he had started referring to Weisweiler as ‘this guy’ was a sure sign that the once harmonious relationship between coach and captain was as good as over.
Talking to the New York Times, Weisweiler conceded that the bond had been broken, although he considered Chinaglia’s persistent interference in team selection and tactics, not to mention his lack of goals in the tail end of the regular season, as the primary factors in their dispute. ‘I am the chief of this team. You cannot do this with me,’ he insisted. That is how my friendship with Chinaglia started to go to bad.’
Having witnessed the treatment Carlos Alberto had received at the hands of Weisweiler, Chinaglia was concerned that he too would soon be joining the players on the bench. He was, after all, thirty-four years old and what pace he once possessed was now disappearing. Indeed, rumors would circulate that Chinaglia’s place in the Cosmos starting lineup was no longer guaranteed and that Weisweiler was considering relegating the NASL’s all-time record goal scorer to the bench. Not so, said Weisweiler. ‘I never threatened to bench Giorgio because I know that the great scorers sometimes go into slumps. But Giorgio is thirty-five years old next year. Maybe he knows I am tough enough to bench him if he does not score.’
It certainly sounded like a threat. As the Cosmos progressed to another Soccer Bowl final—Chinaglia scoring six times in five play-off games—the feud between coach and player sim-mered and distracted press and fans alike away from the fact that for the first time since Pelé’s final year, the average attendance for the Cosmos’s home games had dipped under 35,000. The second leg of the semifinal against Fort Lauderdale revealed the scale of the decline. In 1977, the same matchup had drawn over 77,000 fans to Giants Stadium for the play-off game. Now, just 31,112 showed up.
The contrast with U.S. profootball could not have been more striking. As attendances across the NASL plummeted, the NFL had also capitalized on growing disillusionment with baseball—a midseason players’ strike had found little support among fans—and registered an all-time record attendance average of 60,000 fans per game.
That said, close to 37,000 would turn up in the driving rain to see the season showpiece at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto, where the Cosmos’s opponents would be the Chicago Sting, coached by Willy Roy, a former NASL star from Germany. As a city, Chicago had been without a championship in any sport for over eighteen years. The last had been the National Football League title won by the Chicago Bears in 1963. The Cosmos, in comparison, had grown accustomed to winning and any season without the Soccer Bowl trophy could only ever be deemed a failure.
It would be a closely fought contest but one that didn’t really live up to its pre: game billing. While the Sting had already beaten the Cosmos twice in the regular season, this was their first appearance in the Soccer Bowl. After ninety minutes of play, though, the teams were even, both having failed to score. The Sting, aggressive and resolute, had taken the game to the reigning champions but had been kept at bay by the Cosmos keeper, Hubert Birkenmeier. The Cosmos, meanwhile, had been conservative and reserved. There was only a Giorgio Chinaglia scissors kick that came remotely close to breaching the defenses of the Sting.
A tie at the final whistle meant another shoot-out. Even in the shoot-out, goals would once more be at a premium. With only Vladislav Bogicevic managing to convert his attempt for the Cosmos, it was left to the Sting’s American midfielder Rudy Glenn to wrap up Chicago’s first NASL title and condemn the Cosmos to its first Soccer Bowl defeat in four appearances. ‘I think Chicago wanted it more, and they took it,’ Giorgio Chinaglia said impassively after the game.
The Cosmos’s Dutch defender Wim Rijsbergen was less gracious in defeat. Tf they were the better team they should have finished first in the regular season,’ he said, referring to the Cosmos’s five-point advantage over the Sting after thirty-two games. ‘I grant you they beat us twice in the regular season, but if they were truly better they shouldn’t have to go to a shoot-out here tonight.’
For Bob Iarusci, it was especially difficult to take. Not only was he playing in his hometown in front of his friends and family, he also had to suffer the ignominy of missing the decisive shoot-out attempt. ‘I was the last guy that night. It was pouring rain and everybody had missed. And we had Julio César Romero, Neeskens, Cabanas and François Van der Elst and they all refused to take the shot. The coach said, “Will you take it?” and I said, “Yeah, I don’t care.” So I took it, the goalkeeper made a really good save and that was it . . . The hometown boy could have made good, but I didn’t.’
With the game over and the Cosmos now only holding the title of former NASL champions, the gloves came off between Giorgio Chinaglia and Hennes Weisweiler. Incensed at the way the team was being handled and the manner in which it had succumbed in the Soccer Bowl, Chinaglia vowed not to go on the post-season tours to Canada and Europe if Weisweiler was still in charge of the Cosmos. ‘There’s no way I can do that,’ he said. ‘I have to look in the mirror.’
Chinaglia’s objections were myriad. Under Weisweiler, he believed that the Cosmos had betrayed its tradition of eyecatching soccer in favor of more conservative and precautionary strategies. The coach, Chinaglia said, had ‘never tried to make the game more entertaining’. Moreover, the striker believed that unlike himself Weisweiler’s heart wasn’t really in American soccer, maintaining that the coach seemed to show no great interest in developing soccer on a wider scale. Chinaglia had a point. Since arriving in the States, Weisweiler hadn’t given a single clinic, nor made one public appearance on behalf of the team or, for that matter, attended any of the monthly meetings of the two Cosmos fan clubs.
It was a view reinforced by Julio Mazzei. ‘Here your job as coach is 40 percent on the field, 60 percent off the field. You must meet the press, soccer clubs, scout players, sell the game. One time I had three hundred coaches for a clinic, and Hennes said he didn’t have the time to meet people like that.’
For all Chinaglia’s concerns, Weisweiler actually did have more important things to worry about. At sixty-one, he had just become a father for the first time and he was still in demand as a coach back home. ‘I have no reason to quit. No, never. I have one more year on my contract,’ he insisted. ‘Jobs are not a problem for me. I have clubs in Germany waiting for me. I am not afraid of that. I can get along with Giorgio Chinaglia. All we have to do is give a little.’
That, clearly, wasn’t going to happen. As long as Giorgio Chinaglia continued to be so close to Steve Ross, there was little chance that any coach, regardless of reputation or record, would be given preferential treatment over the chairman of the board’s chosen one. Indeed, Ross had already sounded Chinaglia out about taking over as general manager of the Cosmos when his playing days were over. For a coach like Weisweiler, who had never really endeared himself to the New York fans, either with his brand of soccer or with his personality, there was only ever going to be one outcome.
While a truce was called for the post-season tour—Chinaglia eventually relented because he had ‘an obligation to his teammates’—it was clear that Weisweiler was now living on borrowed time. Since Chinaglia’s arrival at the club in 1976, no coach had survived such a public dispute with the Italian and Chinaglia wasn’t about to start giving way now. The only remaining question was whether the club could afford the $350,000 payoff that terminating Weisweiler’s contract would entail.
To his credit, Weisweiler persevered, making the best of an unenviable position. All the time, Weisweiler talked down the rift with his leading striker, publicly welcoming Chinaglia’s renewed commitment to the team and looking forward to reclaiming the NASL title the following season.
The tour came and went, with the usual maddening mix of notable victories and comical defeats (the 7–1 thumping against Lille of France was the most perplexing). Weisweiler remained dignified throughout, never doing anything that might jeopardize the compensation package that was surely coming his way. It was as if he was just waiting for the check to arrive.
Another man who was covering himself was Steve Ross. As Raymond Kassar announced plans to merge Atari’s many offices in Sunnyvale, California into one fifty-acre, $300 million ‘Atari Campus’, the chairman of the Warner board was busy making plans to protect himself in the event of Atari’s lifespan being shorter than analysts the world over expected.
As the financial world fawned over the rocket ship that was Atari, Ross initiated a process that would see 360,000 of his Warner shares transferred to a family partnership, a move that would not only protect him from any reversal in Atari’s fortunes but also assist WCI in reducing their tax burden.
It was a typically judicious move from Ross. Throughout his time as the head of Warner, Ross had never owned more than 1 percent of the company, thereby sparing himself any of the entrepreneurial risk that other executives took while still allowing him to claim handsome remuneration packages. In 1981, for instance, Ross took a salary and bonus package of $3.2 million and a further $7.4 million from exercising a variety of other bonus schemes. It was proof that while his dalliance with the Cosmos had perhaps fostered an image of a big-spending sports nut with scant regard for budgets, the reality was that he was still one of the smartest operators in town.